The text is framed by a detailed chronology of Nabokov's life and work and
a well-selected bibliography. Both are nicely articulated and provide just the
right amount of information. The same principle holds generally for the rest of
the work as well. Olsen offers brief but choice data on and insights into the
author, the novel itself, its critical reception (both in historical and conceptual
overview), its incarnations in other media, especially, of course, the Kubrick film,
and the host of critical problems raised by the text. The discussion is given a
good grounding both in general critical concerns, and in terms of Nabokov's
idiosyncratic approach to writing and to this work, in particular.
Olsen does a commendable job of confronting the complexity and
ambiguities of Lolita ; indeed, he confronts them directly and makes them the
focus of his study, whence the reference to Janus in the title. This is hardly an
original approach to any text, least of all to a major work of twentieth-century
fiction with one foot in the modern and the other reaching for the post-modern.
Still, it is not unfruitful, and the reader is presented with a full and satisfying
range of possibilities for reading Lolita, notwithstanding the brief and
introductory nature of this study. Olsen is sufficiently even-handed in his
discussion to the extent that his reader can disagree with even substantial
individual conclusions and still not feel inclined to disregard the whole.
The only truly regrettable aspect of this useful study is the almost
neurotically obsessive apologetics Olsen constructs for the entire enterprise
based on his predilection for a deconstructivist a n d / o r postmodernist poetics
which does not really allow for the validity of such a study, never mind a series
based on the notion of Masterworks. The fact that he feels the need to apologize at
considerable length for what he is doing implies a somewhat slippery
compromise with his own intellectual principles, while the success with which
he nevertheless carries out his undertaking would seem to serve as a rather
strong challenge to, if not contradiction of, those very principles.
William V. Spanos
The Errant Art of "Moby-Dick": The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for
American Studies
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995. Pp. 416. $18.95
Reviewed by Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso
William Spanos's new book is, like his other previous works, not only an
exercise in Heideggerian criticism but also a brilliant demonstration of the effects
of (close) textual reading on the appreciation of the value of literary works, from
their representational powers and limits to their possible function as canonmakers. And Spanos's choice to focus now on Melville's masterpiece confirms
74
The International Fiction Review 24 (1997)
the interest of his ontological "reading method" to assess the aesthetic and
cultural role of fictional works in the academic study of literature.
This new analysis traces a genealogy of literary criticism on Moby Dick from
its indifferent reception at the time of its publication to the transfiguration and
re-appropriation of its cultural, and supposedly canonizing, role in American
literary history by the so-called "New Americanists." Spanos distinguishes four
major phases in Moby Dick criticism—represented by its contemporaneous
reviewers, the "revival" critics of the early 20th century, the Cold War critics, and
the contemporary New Americanists—each one of which postulates a specific
(and interested) reading of Melville's work according to its own intellectual
occasion in the history of American culture. Each of these "trends" carries out
and privileges a reading of Moby Dick that serves the institutional and sociopolitical mainstream of its own age, usually cooperating to uphold the
centrality of Melville's novel to the formation and consolidation of the American
experience as a (timeless) "errand into the wilderness"—whatever particular
form this quest assumes in each of these periods. All of them inevitably
appropriate and study Melville's work not only as the "core" of the novel as a
genre in America, but also as a vital thematic source of American culture. The
Errant Art of "Moby Dick" attempts to disclose, among other things, the
ideological bias of all four groups of critics.
For Spanos, Melville's novel enacts and advances some of the
epistemological assumptions of the postmodern age, such as the distrust of
totalization and of literary, textual, and philosophical representation. Writing
appears more as a process of "pure" (anti-essentialist) interpretation than as a
reproduction of the real. In Melville's work, writes Spanos, "the act of
interpretation ... is not intended to break through representation to an
ontological essence.... Rather, it is to thematize—to bring to awareness—the
absent Real that is always already historically specific inscription (textual), and
thus always already deferred by writing as re-presentation" (171).
What emerges from this ontological analysis is a revaluation of Melville's
novel as a subversive text, one in which the different conservative traditions of
(Puritan) America are disclosed and dismantled, on the one hand, and in which
some of the principles of the postmodern attack on metaphysical representation
and objectivity are prefigured, on the other. As Spanos puts it, "[Moby Dick]
anticipates the difficult posthumanist search for a collective sociopolitical
counterhegemonic project that is 'grounded' in an absent cause" (148). Melville's
text, therefore, stands in American literary history not as the canon-inspiring
work many critics consider it to be, but rather as a de-structive artifact which
calls into question the most deep-rooted epistemological and ontological
assumptions of American (and Western) literary history and aesthetics. After
these four major stages in Melville criticism, now made problematic and maybe
Book Reviews
75
"overcome" by the postmodern occasion and by Spanos's Heideggerian
criticism, will The Errant Art of "Moby Dick" inaugurate a fifth one?
Robert Pinget
Be Brave
Trans, from the French by Barbara Wright
New York: Red Dust, 1994. Pp. 32. $6.95
Robert Pinget
Théo or The New Era
Trans, from the French by Barbara Wright
New York: Red Dust, 1994. Pp. 32. $6.95
Reviewed by John Fletcher
Barbara Wright is our foremost literary translator from the French, and in
these short texts she deploys her awe-inspiring skills to impressive effect. The
only possible mistake (if it is even that) located in the works under review is in
the following lines in Be Brave: "There was a boat for the islands. / Only
passengers without a ticket embarked" (5). The French reads: "Il y avait un bateau
pour les îles. /N'embarquait que passagers sans ticket."
What makes one think at first that Wright has misread the French is that
embarquer here is the transitive form of the verb, whereas in the English version
"embarked" appears to be intransitive. (If the French verb were intransitive, it
would of course have to be plural.) Wright is well aware of this, but—quite
properly, no doubt for reasons of euphony—translates a French transitive verb
with an English intransitive verb, which enables her to place the latter at the end
of the sentence, which avoids the rather clumsy "Embarked only passengers
without a ticket." (Another way of doing it would be to put "Only passengers
without a ticket taken on board.") Thus the most that can be said is that Wright is
guilty of a possible ambiguity (over whether "embarked" is transitive or
intransitive), not of an actual mistake.
Such quibbles aside, there are some marvelous felicities in these translations,
such as the following in Théo:
"Paroles que le rêve fait resurgir toutes
frémissantes." "Words that surge up, quivering, from the dream" (6). "Tout ce qui
concerne le bonheur enfui. / Enfoui. Exhumable." "Everything that concerns lost
happiness. / Inhumed. Exhumable" (6). The latter is particularly impressive,
since it compensates for the inevitable loss of the pun enfui/ertfoui
with an English
play on words (inhume/exhume).
The only serious doubt in my mind is whether this magnificent translator's
efforts would not be better directed towards producing English versions of texts
76
The International Fiction Review 24 (1997)